Given the flood of apocalyptic films inspired by the arrival of 2012 — the Mayans’ predicted end of days — it was pretty much inevitable someone would try to give the subject a comic twist.
The feeble darkish comedy “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’’ has its laughs, but pretty much every single one of them is in the trailer. And even more unfortunately, the improbable new romantic comedy team of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley works about as well as you’d guess — like oil and water.
Carell does most of the heavy comic lifting as a sad sack named Dodge, who jokes that he’s “getting my midlife crisis in just under the wire.’’
When it’s announced that a space mission to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth (shades of “Armageddon’’ and “Deep Impact’’) has failed, Dodge’s wife runs off with a man with whom she’s already been having an affair.
Our hero continues quixotically reporting for work as an insurance salesman — in an office where casual dress is now welcome every day and a volunteer is sought to serve as CFO — at least until a suicide lands on his windshield at his rooftop parking spot.
The movie’s biggest surprise comes when we’re told Dodge is supposed to live in New York City — nothing in this movie, shot in Southern California, looks remotely like an East Coast location (especially that rooftop parking spot).
Knightley plays Penny, a ditsy neighbor in his apartment building who turns up on his fire escape after a fight with her boorish boyfriend. After a singularly unconvincing riot, the bickering new couple take off for an equally implausible New Jersey.
Dodge offers to provide Penny with a wildly improbable means to pay a last visit to her parents in England. And along the way, he hopes to reconnect with a high-school sweetheart whose letter from a year earlier is turned over to him by Penny.
Along the way, they have sex — a perfunctory scene that appears to be as embarrassing for the actors as their characters — witness a suicide or two, visit a family restaurant with a giddy staff and develop what’s supposed to be a real, last-minute relationship.
The lack of chemistry between the two leads doesn’t really allow for this possibility, even with Knightley’s considerable skill as a dramatic actor.
The film wastes such formidable laugh-getters as Patton Oswalt (virtually his entire role is in the trailer) and Rob Corddry, while ladling on the schmaltz in a climactic sequence with Martin Sheen as Dodge’s long-estranged father.
Screenwriter Lorene Scafaria (the similarly fey “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist’’) is over her head in her feature directing debut, unable to establish a consistent tone in a movie that flirts with black comedy, satire, romantic comedy and touchy-feely earnestness without really delivering any of them.
“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’’ is, at best, the sort of innocuously amusing comedy that would suffice as a video rental. As a radio announcer puts it, “We’ll be bringing you a countdown to the end of days along with all your classic rock favorites.’’